Revisionist History - Silicon Valley on the Couch

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

Why is Silicon Valley where it is? How did a narrow valley in California become the epicenter of the computer age? People usually say it’s because of Stanford, or the weather. But the answer may be something much more … Freudian. In this episode, Malcolm puts William Shockley—inventor of the transistor, winner of the Nobel Prize, father of Silicon Valley—on the couch.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello everyone. Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know about two new exciting shows from Pushkin Industries that you might be interested in. The first is McCartney, A Life in Lyrics with Sir Paul McCartney. You'll hear conversations between McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, with Sir Paul McCartney. You'll hear conversations between McCartney and poet Paul Muldoon as they dissect the inspirations that shaped McCartney's songwriting. It's a combination masterclass, memoir, and improvised journey. If you're a McCartney or a Beatles fan, you will love this show. Pushkin's other new series is from Michael Lewis, Against the Rules. The new special series is called Judging Sam, The Trial of Sam Bankman Freed. SBF, the former CEO of

crypto exchange FTX, is being tried for financial crimes. And Against the Rules is following the trial that decides his fate. So go ahead, listen to McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, and Against the Rules is following the trial that decides his fate. So go ahead, listen to McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, and Against the Rules wherever you get your podcasts. You can also unlock exclusive binge listens and ad-free listening for these shows on their Apple Podcast show pages or at pushkin.fm slash plus. It's a beautiful morning in Northern California. I flew in last night, drove down from San Francisco Airport to Mountain View,

and then I got up first thing in the morning, and I'm here at last. 391 San Antonio Road. In the heart of Silicon Valley, on the wall of an office building, there's a small plaque. And next to it, a chart. A family tree of companies, dozens of them. National Semiconductor, Fairchild, Varian, Intel. It's the kind of display you could easily miss if you weren't looking for it. Which is a shame, because it's a monument to the origins

of one of the greatest technological revolutions in human history. It's an office building on a four-lane, six-lane road, kind of a main thoroughfare through Mountain View. Apartments on one side, office buildings on the other. I think 391 might be a Facebook building. I think I read that somewhere. But back in the day, it was just a little Quonset hut on this site, a little wooden structure and big windows up front

with a sign over the door. And I just want to read you the plaque that is on the front of the building today. Birthplace of Silicon Valley, 1956. At this location, 391 San Antonio Road, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory manufactured the first silicon devices in what became known as Silicon Valley.

Some of the talented scientists and engineers initially employed there left to found their own companies, leading to the birth of the silicon electronics industry in the region. Hundreds of firms in electronics and computing can trace their origins back to Shockley Semiconductor. Here's my question that brought me all the way from New York City to this building in the middle of Silicon Valley. Why was Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories here on San Antonio Road?

Of all the places in America, why did Silicon Valley start right where I'm standing? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about how the long, narrow valley that lies between the Santa Clara Mountains

and San Francisco Bay became the epicenter of the modern age. The transistor, the forerunner of today's computer chips, was invented in 1947 by the team headed by a physicist named William Shockley. Before that, computers and everything electronic ran on vacuum tubes, which were underpowered, oversized, fragile. In the late 40s, that changed forever. Shockley invented the transistor, and then there was the chip. And then out of Silicon Valley came a stream of technologies that gave us the world we live in now. But Shockley didn't invent the transistor in Northern California. He invented it in New Jersey, at the famous Bell Labs in Murray

Hill, about 10 miles outside of Newark. Then he left Bell Labs and took a teaching job at Caltech in Pasadena, just outside of Los Angeles. And after a stint there and a stint at the Pentagon, he decides to strike out on his own. He lines up a wealthy backer. He starts a company called Shockley Semiconductor, and he recruits the best and the brightest from all around the country. Everyone comes from somewhere else to a Quonset hut on 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View because William Shockley wants to set up shop in a Quonset hut on 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View. The first question I have is really about

looking at this from the perspective of the mid-50s, the very beginning. Yeah. If you and I were having a conversation in 1955, and we were told a computer revolution was coming in the United States, and I said to you, Anno, where do you think that revolution will take place? What would you have told me? My first call to Anno Saxanian, professor at Berkeley, who has spent her career trying to understand why certain parts of the country are home to innovation and others aren't. Probably I would have said Boston. Boston, maybe New Jersey, maybe Chicago, less so New York, you know, definitely on the Northeast

where all the big manufacturing operations were. And that's the reason. Be more specific about what it was about those three cities that would have led you to think that's where the revolution was coming. Well, first of all, you know, the transistor was being invented at Bell Labs. So there's technical capability. Also, you know, MIT, also, you know, activities around Columbia. So there's universities, there's money.

I mean, it's the Northeast, so you've got New York right there. So you've got financing. It's expensive to invent, you know, transistors and then computers and whatnot. You got proximity to Washington, D.C. Military contracts really supported the early decades of development. So you've got people, you've got capital, you've got contacts, and you've got existing corporations. That's where the expertise was. That's where all the action was.

I asked the same question of Nathan Myhrvold, one of the key figures in the growth of Microsoft and one of the OGs of the computer industry. New Jersey and Philadelphia would have been the best bet. Well, von Neumann would still have been at Institute for Advanced Study, and he was super involved. Aronoff and the team that built ENIAC were at University of Pennsylvania, and Bell Labs was there. It also had, oh, it had RCA and Sarnoff Labs. So the Sarnoff Labs of RCA are in Princeton, New Jersey.

And that was where David Sarnoff was sort of ruling the roost technically in radio. And that was a big, big, big, big deal. So that's where you would have thought it was because it was already the center of a ton of both radio and electronics and computing. Now, there are a few theories out there about why Shockley chose to set up in the Santa Clara Valley. One that might seem obvious is that right next door to Mountain View is Palo Alto. And Palo Alto is the home of Stanford University, a world-class institution spitting out one brilliant mind after another. But you're thinking of today's Stanford. I want to talk about Stanford for a moment. Why are you rolling your eyes? Because Stanford always gets all the attention, and it

became very important. In the 50s, it was not important. It was kind of a regional place. So it can't have been the important institution. MIT was way ahead at that time. The whole thing makes no sense. When he's thinking of setting up his startup, Shockley crisscrosses the country. He goes to see one of the Rockefellers. He visits the leading electronics companies of the day. He combs through their financial statements. He does a comparison of the cost of living in Cambridge, Washington, D.C., and Michigan. Yale says, we'll give you everything you want. Bell Labs says, come back. Everybody wants him. And what does he do? He says no. He finally finds a backer he likes, a wealthy entrepreneur named Arnold Beckman, who is based near Caltech in

Pasadena. Beckman loves Shockley, loves his ideas. Beckman's company makes sophisticated scientific equipment. He has resources, infrastructure, skilled technicians. He says to Shockley, set up here in Pasadena. My guys can help out. I want you here. Shockley already knows Pasadena. He literally worked at Caltech. His benefactor, the man giving him all his money, wants him to be there. Shockley says, no. I want to be in the apricot orchards

of the Santa Clara Valley. I find all of the seemingly obvious explanations to be unconvincing. It's a mystery. It's a mystery. Next on my list, Richard Florida, author of the hugely influential study, Rise of the Creative Class, another take on why certain regions take off and others don't. But here's the one I really want to talk to you about, which is the weather.

Is it at all? Is it at all? Why are you looking at me like this? Why? I hear the weather explanation, and I just roll my eyes. As you should. As I should. Okay, so tell me why the weather explanation is nonsense. Well, I mean, Boston was pretty good at this stuff.

And, you know, I mean, if anything, Silicon Valley emulated Boston, right? In the standard explanation for Silicon Valley, right after people say it was all because of Stanford, they add, oh, and the weather is amazing, as if that settles it. But Florida's point is, since when is there some magical correlation between technological revolutions and good weather? He's totally right. I have to say, the weather argument has always driven me crazy. How many times do people say, as a way of explaining the decline of rust-spelt cities like Buffalo

or Detroit or Cleveland, well, the weather's terrible. Who would want to live there? Meanwhile, north of the border, directly on the other side of Lake Ontario, there are two of the most successful tech hubs in the world, Toronto and its sibling down the road, Waterloo, which have exactly the same weather as Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland. I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon for nearly 20 years. And, you know, we were trying to figure out why Pittsburgh had not turned into a tech hub of the sorts of Boston, Cambridge, or Palo Alto, the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, the Bay Area. And then somebody said to me, well, one of our peer institutions is Waterloo.

You should look at them because they're really good. Yeah. And the weather in Waterloo, as someone who grew up outside of Waterloo, is atrocious. It's not great. I was just there. It's freezing. I was like, what? It's not the weather. And I was thinking, your good friend, Bill Gates, drops out of Harvard because he wants to start a software company, but doesn't go to Silicon Valley, goes home to Seattle. When I was talking to Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft came up, naturally. Microsoft is the reason Seattle turned into a major tech hub.

That's why Amazon's there. But why was Microsoft in Seattle? The story on that is very funny. What's the story? He and Paul started the company, Microsoft it is, in New Mexico because the first PC company was in Albuquerque. He being Bill Gates, Paul being his co-founder, Paul Allen. They were high school friends from Seattle. And so they literally went across the street from this first PC company and rented some space and they started Microsoft. Well, within a few years, that company had gone under and Microsoft was doing super well.

And so Bill sort of characteristically does this big analysis and decides they had to be near either O'Hare Airport or Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Because from those airports, you could get to anywhere in the United States with a commercial, because no one's thinking private aviation back then. You could get there and get back and be more efficient. Yeah. And Paul says, God, the weather's terrible terrible those places. Let's just go home. Exactly. Paul Allen tells his Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates that they shouldn't move to Chicago or Dallas. They should go home to Seattle because the weather is better there. And you and I both know

the weather in Seattle is not better. It's terrible. It does nothing but rain. And by the way, since when does a software programmer care about what the weather's like? They never go outside. I think about this mystery every time I go to Northern California. You land at San Francisco Airport. You drive south down the 101. Fog everywhere. Traffic is appalling. Strip malls on one side, bad office buildings on the other. And Stanford. Enough already about Stanford. It's supposed to be this crown jewel. Have you ever been there? It looks like someone gave a billion dollars to Taco Bell and said, build me a university. Democracy had as its crucible Athens. The Renaissance had Florence. The Impressionists had Paris. The digital

age has Best Buy and In-N-Out Burger. I don't get it. My father was a mining engineer, and I maintain that I am probably a cockney, because I believe in the right weather conditions, you could hear the Palo Alto Historical Association in the 1960s. Picture a shiny bald head, thick glasses, chiseled features, handsome, fit, and that even relentless delivery. He was born in London in 1910. The Shockleys returned to the United States when he was three. He skipped middle school, all of it. Just went straight from elementary school to high school, Hollywood High in Los Angeles. And then you went on to college? Yes, I went to Caltech for my undergraduate work and then to MIT for a PhD. I was a physics major all from about my sophomore year in college.

And after your PhD, armed with your diploma, where did you go? I went to Bell Telephone Laboratories at that time where I worked for C.J. Davison, who won the Nobel Prize around 1938 for electron diffraction. And he was one of the attractions that brought me to Bell Laboratories. Shockley's father was older. He died when Shockley was young. Shockley was an only child raised by his mother, Mae Bradford Shockley. Austere, intimidating, emotionally withholding. She grew up in New Mexico, a tomboy comfortable on horseback

and handy with a gun. She had a math degree in an era when most women didn't have degrees at all. One of the first female mining surveyors in the country. She was an accomplished artist who made a small fortune trading stocks on the side. Her IQ was 161. I mean, come on! If we're going to understand Shockley's great decision, we have to understand Shockley, right? So I called up the New York Psychoanalytic Society and I said, I need to talk to someone about William Shockley because this combination, absent father, brilliant only child, dominant mother, is just a Freudian field day. And they got right back to me with a name, Philip Hirschenfeld, Upper East Side. The psychoanalytic community and William Shockley, for reasons that will become obvious, turn out to be well acquainted. So as I explained to you, I had this notion in my head that Freud was very interested in this question of the brilliant

only child and a strong mother. Am I right? That Freud had thought about it. What did he have to say about that? He said, and I think he was also talking about himself. Just to be clear, when a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society uses the pronoun he, there's about a 99% chance they're referring to Freud. That any son who is the, this is not the exact quote, the undisputed favorite of his mother goes through life with the feeling of being a conqueror. And that's a very powerful feeling. When Shockley was eight, his mother May wrote in her diary, I woke up with a thought in my mind. The only heritage I care to leave to Billy is the feeling of force and the joy of responsibility for setting the world right on something. He's eight. What mother writes of her eight-year-old that she

desires to leave him with a feeling of force? Good Lord. What was Freud's explanation for why that relationship would have imbued the son with such power? Because it's what any young child strives for. If you are a fan of the Oedipus complex, which I am, you know, there's evidence of it everywhere in Shakespeare, in literature, in life. That young child has the feeling of conquering, of overpowering his father, perhaps, and basking in this love. And there are many examples of that in history. So, yeah, I think it can be a very powerful feeling. So we have this brilliant mother who is a little emotionally reserved.

The son, Shockley, is handsome, unbelievably brilliant. I mean, everyone, I mean, beyond, he said his first word at four months. Mm-hmm. You know, that kind of, right from the get-go kind of brilliant. Yeah. Unbelievably competitive and self-confident. A champion athlete. To this day, there's a, in the, you're not a mountain climber, are you?

There's a mountain ranger. I live rightber, are you? There's a mountain ridge. I live right near the Gonks. Oh, the Gonks. Do you know about Shockley's Cliff? Yes, I do. I know about Shockley's Cliff. Ceiling. The Shaughna Gonks are a mountain range in the Catskills,

just outside of New York City. Shockley conquered a particularly challenging rock formation there, and immediately they named it after him. Literally, there is no mountain he cannot climb. There's a really wonderful biography of Shockley written some years ago by Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius, which begins with the sentence, I believe that William Shockley was, in terms of practical impact on the world, one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

And then Shurkin goes on to convince you why that's true. And here's the strange thing. The most compelling chapter of the book is not the part about Shockley's role in the invention of the transistor. Arguably one of the one or two most important innovations of the 20th century. No, it's the chapter on what Shockley did during the Second World War.

It's insane. Basically, it's the chapter on what Shockley did during the Second World War. It's insane. Basically, he's working at Bell Labs, then the premier industry research and development organization in the world. And the government comes to him just before the war and says, hey, we're doing some interesting things with uranium. Do you think it might someday be possible

to generate power from nuclear fuel? Two months later, Shockley comes back and says, here you go. This is how you do it. Word gets around that there's this genius in New Jersey. And so he signs on as the kind of problem solver in chief with the Secretary of War. He gets an official pass from the government that allows him to board any commercial flight. And over the course of the Second World War, he flies all around the world solving problems. The Navy says we're having trouble hitting German submarines

with underwater explosives. Can you help? Within two months, Shockley has increased their hit rate by 500%. Shurkin estimates that Shockley's ideas about protecting the Navy's ships saved thousands of lives in the North Atlantic. Some of you may remember the series we did at Revisionist History about Curtis LeMay's firebombing campaign of Japan at the end of the Second World War. Who flew to the South Pacific to teach bombing crews about how to use radar during night attacks?

Shockley. I could go on. He's the guy who writes one of the crucial memos proving that many, many more millions of lives would be lost if America invaded Japan at the end of the Second World War than if it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ends, the Pentagon won't let him go. They've never met anyone like him before. Then he helps invent the transistor, wins the Nobel Prize, has the idea to start the first,

the original computer age startup, and crisscrosses America, convincing one brilliant mind after another to join his new venture. This dynamic genius walks into the labs of 20-something graduate students across the country and announces, I am Shockley.

I am here representing the future. Here's the physicist Victor Jones remembering his first contact with Shockley. Everyone, by the way, who met Shockley remembers the first time they met Shockley. I was in my working talks in the lab, but Shockley said, why don't you go get cleaned up and we'll go off for lunch.

And we went off to lunch at the Fairmont Hotel for a starving graduate student. That was a bit of a shock. But it was probably the most intense afternoon of physics that I've had in quite a long time. They talked for seven hours. Then Shockley was off to jump on a plane or a train to recruit another young talent.

Here is Jay Last, another of Shockley's best and brightest, in an interview with the historian David Brock. He came in and personally visited me at MIT, and I was telling him my some of the problems I was having with my doctoral work and why can't you just figure it out in a second really just unbelievable mind so that must have impressed you great yes yeah and so then I went down to visit him in another visit in Washington at the Cosmos Club. And he said, come down and join me for breakfast.

So I took him and I trained down there. And here we were sitting at a table with like Admiral Rickover, every Vannevar Bush, everybody I'd ever heard about was sitting at that table having breakfast with chocolate. And so it was quite overwhelming. Impressive, quite overwhelming. Admiral Rickover was one of the most famous military figures of his day, the pioneer of nuclear propulsion. Vannevar Bush was, and there's famous military figures of his day, the pioneer of nuclear propulsion.

Vannevar Bosch was, and there's no better way to put it, the king of American science at the time. That was just breakfast. There are countless stories like this. Here's a young physicist named Julius Blank, who Shockley summoned to meet him at Newark Airport between flights. Did he describe to you then or early on in the whole conversation about what he wanted to do with Shockley Semiconductors? Not really. I didn't think he knew.

His main thrust was silicon. He wanted to focus on silicon and ways to make devices out of it. They weren't sure whether they were going to do alloy or diffusion. They were exploring to find out what the best way was. They didn't even know what to make, just to make a transistor with silicon. At the time, most people were trying to make computer chips out of something called germanium, which is far inferior to silicon, not to mention that germanium valley doesn't sound nearly as glamorous. Shockley was like, no, no, I have a better idea. But,

and this is a crucial but, why is his biography called Broken Genius? Because there's another side to Shockley. There always is, isn't there? It shows up early. He's an impossible child. He bites his parents, breaks things, throws tantrums. Once he fires a stone at a dachshund and hits the dog squarely between the eyes. That temper never goes away. He's cold, grandiose.

He turns on the charm when he's recruiting all those brilliant young scientists to join his startup in Mountain View. But once they arrive, they quickly realize he's a monster. He's controlling, paranoid. Here's Harry Sello, one of Shockley's earliest hires. What was the initial contact like?

The initial contact was an invitation to come and talk to him. Okay. and he told me about who he was and just get acquainted but he what he didn't tell me was what i had to go through before i could be accepted and that was three days of intense psychological examinations and uh that's a story practically in itself. I mean, I went weekends. I couldn't go from work, so I went on Saturdays and Sundays,

three successive weekends, and went through a battery of psychological tests you wouldn't believe. Shockley forced every one of his recruits to take Rorschach tests, the thematic apperception test, brain teasers, imagine a tennis tournament with 127 entrants,

blah, blah, blah. He wanted to make sure they were smart enough to work for him, but not smarter than him. And the reason for those tests, as we probably already know, was that he did not trust the behavior of the scientists that he had already run across, or felt he had run across. It was a reflection of the trouble he was beginning to have with his senior scientists. Once, Shockley's secretary cut herself on a pin that was sticking in a door. Shockley was convinced someone had deliberately put it there

in an attempt to injure him as he opened the door. He confronted his staff. They denied it. So he tried to ship everyone up to San Francisco to take a lie detector test. Roberts later on was the one who solved the famous episode of the pin, which you

probably heard about. Sheldon Roberts, another of Shockley's best and brightest. Yeah, the push pin that Shockley felt somebody had placed to try to get him. And Roberts simply took the pin out of the wall, stuck it under the microscope, and saw it was a thumbtack which had broken off. Shockley never believed that. I didn't believe that.

This is why, in fact, Shockley Semiconductor ends up spawning so many other companies. Shockley brings the world's computer geniuses to Mountain View, and then after just a year, eight of Shockley's most brilliant hires decide enough is enough and leave en masse to start other companies. From that point on, they're known as the Traderess Eight. And the reason they start their new companies in the Santa Clara Valley, by the way, as opposed to going back to the East Coast, is that they've all bought houses in Palo Alto, which is something that someone in their 20s could do back then,

if you can imagine that. One thing that Shockley told me, a story, I could see it was more than a joke to him. It was something fairly serious. It was about a fellow in a mental institution who's looking out through the bars and sees a truck driving under an underpass and a truck gets stuck and they can't figure out how to get the truck out and the guy in the asylum shouts out well

just let the air out of the tires a little bit and then you push it through and he said well how's the guy in a mental institution figure it out and the guy said I may be crazy but I'm not stupid and I could see the sort of attention to his voice when he was telling me and he told that story

to me twice so I could tell the I could see something that he was thinking along these lines that

with his brilliancy, that we had some very serious other problems. Oh yes, he did. By the way, we're about to talk about suicide and mental health difficulties. So let me tell you what I think some of the foundations of his personality might have been. Back on the couch with Dr. Hirschenfeld. Number one, the genius level intellectual endowment. Number two, the infusion of his mother's approval, encouragement for that, for developing those muscles. Number three, one of the reasons she homeschooled him was because he had uncontrollable temper tantrums. Now, what's that about? Lots of kids have temper tantrums, but they're not to that degree that

it keeps them out of school, at least for some period of time. So what I put that together with is, again, speculation of how, as he got older, he became more and more weird. After he was such a brilliant scientist, inventor of the transistor. He became a really nutty racist, coming up with all sorts of what I would call delusional thinking about race. So when I put that all together, I come up with a bipolar disorder. Oh, wow. Which showed itself early with this, you know, uncontrollable aggression and showed itself later with paranoid thinking. I left this part out. Over the last 20 years of his life, Shockley becomes a full-on eugenicist

who uses his celebrity to mount an offensive and increasingly embarrassing campaign. He wants the government to pay people who he considers to be of inferior genetic stock not to have children, by which he means black people. This is why Shockley's role as the father of Silicon Valley hasn't given him the enduring celebrity of his mid-century peers, like, say, Linus Pauling or Richard Feynman, because he completely goes off the rails. Even Shockley's ceiling, that legendary rock climb in the Shawnegonks,

eventually gets renamed. You know about Shockley's suicide attempt? I do not. Okay. Which would be more kind of interesting. It's when his first marriage is on the rocks and he plays Russian roulette. Okay. And writes out a suicide note, which he then was put in a safe and was discovered upon his death, in which he explains that this was the only course of action he felt.

And he does, he puts the gun to his head and spins the cylinder in the revolver and pulls the trigger and survives. Right. So, you know, this was a man prone to extremes. Shockley's suicide note, by the way, is so shockley and so heartbreaking. It's written to his wife, Jean. Dear Jean, I am sorry that I feel that I can no longer go on. Most of my life, I have felt that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a very admirable form of life. I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself and that most of my actions are the consequence of motives

of which I am ashamed. Most people do not feel this way, I'm sure. Consequently, I must regard myself as less well-suited than most to carry on with life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children. I see no reason to believe other than that I shall continually become worse in these regards as time passes. I hope you have better luck in the future. Shockley's marriage to Jean was always rocky. It's clear he did not consider her his equal. But who was? He didn't even think the best and the brightest who he convinced to join him on San Antonio Road were his equal.

He grew disenchanted with his brilliant hires. And he was forced, over the rest of his life, to watch his protégés go on to become Silicon Valley multimillionaires and billionaires. Intel, the biggest chipmaker in the world, was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Noyce and Moore were brought to the Santa Clara Valley by Shockley.

And Noyce and Moore abandoned Shockley. He spent his final years giving crazy lectures on college campuses in favor of eugenics. An isolated and reviled figure. But he still had mom, Mae Bradford Shockley. Boxes and boxes of their letters sit in the Stanford Library archives. Shockley inviting his mother to join him on a trip. Mae giving her son stock tips. Two emotionally repressed geniuses communicating the best way they know how. In short, concise

notes. Here is Shockley writing to his mother sometime in the early 1950s, at a time when he appears to have suffered something like a nervous breakdown. The letter begins, Dear May, he always called his mother by her first name, to bring you up to date, I am planning to leave the Washington job between the 10th of July and the 10th of August. Jean and I are planning a divorce. No particular hard feelings, I hope, but we do not get along.

I am also probably leaving Bell Labs. Currently, it is my intention to start a company of my own. Just to be clear, in three sentences, in the first paragraph of a two-page letter to his mom, Shockley A. tells her that the work with the Pentagon that has defined his life since the outbreak of the Second World War is over. B, he's leaving his job at Bell Labs, where he has worked since getting his PhD almost 20 years before. C, he intends to start a new company, which will, of course, prove to be the most important startup in the history of startups. And D, oh, by the way, he's divorcing his wife of 20 years, with whom he has three children. Then, next paragraph, he changes the subject.

May writes back, Dear Bill, your letter, quote, filled me with sadness and helplessness, but be assured that always you have my loyalty, sympathy, and affection, and never any questions asked. My loyalty and affection and never any questions asked. That's it. That's all she needs to say. And then she changes the subject. They are forever bound together, peas in a pod. A little bit later, Shockley wins the Nobel. Who does he send a telegram to immediately? Mom, of course. Congratulations on being the mother of a Nobel laureate. And you can feel her heart burst, can't you? To the extent, at least, that her heart could burst. Because her prediction about her eight-year-old wunderkind has come true. The only heritage I care to leave to Billy is the feeling of force and the joy of

responsibility for setting the world right on something. The telegram is addressed, by the way, to Mrs. W.H. Shockley, 261 Waverly Street, Palo Alto. Let me read that to you again, in case you missed it. 261 Waverly Street, Palo Alto, California. William Shockley's mother, May Shockley, lived in Palo Alto. You could walk from her house to 391 San Antonio Road, where Shockley so mysteriously chose to launch his revolution. Why did the Santa Clara Valley become the birthplace of the computer age? Because someone wanted to be close to mom. So let's now turn to what interests me the most, which is this whole episode is an attempt to make sense of this hugely consequential decision Shockley makes, which is to cite his new enterprise, Shockley Labs, in Mountain View, Palo Alto, basically.

And rationally, it makes no sense. The last place you would start a semiconductor company, if you were rational, in 1956, is Palo Alto. And the only thing that's in Palo Alto is his mom. Oh. Isn't that all? I'm reminded of a paper I read years ago, and I can't remember where it was. But a couple of psychologists started studying the histories of virtuoso pianists and violinists.

And they found one thing in common throughout all of them, and only one thing, which is that when they were young children, when they were practicing, their mothers sat with them. Oh, really? Yeah, really. Now, that doesn't mean if your mother sits with you, you're going to turn into a Yasha Haifetz, because you also have to have the gift. But your mother sitting with you does a lot to bring out that gift, to win her approval, to win her admiration. Wait, Philip, this is so lovely. So here we have a man taking the biggest risk of his career.

He's just won the Nobel and he's putting it all on the line to strike out on his own, leaving Bell Labs, the most famous, well-funded, he's leaving all that behind and going to set up shop in a little garage with a bunch of people who he's convinced to come and join him.

And you're saying he needs his mother on the piano bench beside him. I'm also saying that people with this kind of a disorder are extremely impulsive. Often they don't think it out clearly. But I'm also saying that maybe this was a spark of genius, that he knew, for whatever reason, that Palo Alto was the place to have this new beginning. Yeah. But the specific psychological function of needing to be near his mother as he takes this enormous step into the unknown.

Right. That's not trivial. No, no. Is your mother trivial in your life? No, no. Mine is not either. We construct a history of the greatest technological revolution of our time. And we build our theory out of macro forces, institutions, structural advantages. We look for a grand logic, a reason big enough to match the magnitude of the outcome. But there is no grand logic.

There's just an aging widow living on a quiet street in Palo Alto who wanted her golden boy next to her. And the golden boy himself, stretched to the limit by his own demons, who needed her next to him. Why, when we come to do a formal accounting for something like this, are we so allergic to the personal explanation? Because we want to ignore it because that would apply to us also. And we want to paint a rational picture.

We're in Palo Alto because of somebody's mother. This was Freud's biggest struggle. Sure. We're in Palo Alto because of somebody's mother. This was Freud's biggest struggle. This is why he was not accepted in 1895 and why he is still vilified today. Because people don't like to think about their irrational side, their unconscious side. The fact that, yeah, we're smart, we're rational, we do all of these various things. But we also have an unconscious, which is full of sexuality and aggression. And who in their right mind would want to think about that?

The shrine at 391 San Antonio Road is incomplete. Can we fix it, please? Maybe in time for next Mother's Day? In the middle of the massive research campuses, the miles and miles of office buildings, the coders and engineers and technological wizards hunched over their laptops. We need a proper monument. A statue of May Bradford Shockley, front and center, on her horse, gun in hand, watching over her little boy. The grandmother of Silicon Valley.

This episode of Revisionist History was produced by Tully Emlin, Ben-Nadav Hafri, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith. Editing by Peter Clowney and Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz. Mastering by Jake Gorski. And engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glabo. you